Exploring the interdisciplinary issues in labour and digitalisation: Panoptiwork is kicking off in 2023
Panoptiwork is a research project funded by the University of Groningen (RUG). The purpose of the funding is very simple but of a crucial relevance: connecting RUG researchers from different disciplines to explore cross cutting and topical research issues. Starting from January 2023 computer scientists, sociologists, economists, geographers, jurists, philosophers, political scientists will meet to discuss a topic that affects the lives of us all: labour and digitalisation. Our daily working activities – whether manual or intellectual work – are changing at an extremely fast pace, and digitalisation promises to accelerate this on-going mutation of work content and forms.
Researchers are therefore focused on understanding the effects of the much-vaunted artificial intelligence in the workplace, or of the vast array of devices available to us today. A jurist will be faced with new regulatory challenges to balance protect workers’ rights but and a company’s free economic initiative; a computer scientist will be concerned with optimising a product to make it user/employee friendly, a sociologist will be attentive to new organisational dynamics and the distribution of power in new digital hierarchies, and so on.
Bringing all these disciplines and many others into dialogue we expect will produce interesting results and culminate with enriched perspectives from a wide range of academic expertise from the University of Groningen. You can explore the researchers involved in the What (And Who) section of this website.
Our first meeting and debate will take place on 25 January 2023 at the Harmonie Building at 1.15pm. There is a limited number of places available (online), you can register by sending an email to: m.mole@rug.nl
In the course of 2023 we’ll also launch a podcast series: Panoptiwork – The Podcast. With short episodes we are going to explore the main challenges in labour and digitalisation for each discipline involved.
Stay tuned for further updates!
